This mid-life installment of Greene's authorized biography has all the thrills of the writer's ``entertainments'' and the emotional complexity of his serious works. Picking up from the sometimes overly exhaustive Volume One (1989), this work covers a watershed quarter-century in Greene's life and literary career (as well as in 20th-century history) with nary a dull page. Greene's personal life alone in this period—the breakdown of his marriage during the Blitz, his impassioned affair with a married American while unable to free himself of either his wife or his previous mistress—had more than enough grief for two of his best novels, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, which Sherry shows were anguished reflections of his inner life. Yet with all his interviews and access to Greene's papers, even this astute biographer finds his work more accessible than his personality (not even Greene's friends and lovers could claim full intimacy with him). This natural secrecy made Greene a perfect spy, and during WW II he worked for MI6, a division of the British Secret Intelligence Service, in West Africa and London under his lifelong friend, the Soviet double agent Kim Philby, who provided Sherry with many memories of Greene's espionage career (not always reliably, the author later determined). With the end of the war and his marriage, Greene worked for a while as a publisher and screenwriter (most notably of The Third Man), but a later love affair churned up his suicidal nature, which drew him to the Malayan Emergency, the Mau Mau rebellion, and the Indochinese war. Sherry is at his best retracing Greene's activities in Vietnam, recreating the wartime atmosphere and investigating the sources and inspirations for—as well as the distortions in—The Quiet American. Sherry's admirable work beats out even the writer's own memoirs as the definitive account of his life, although Greene remains a character impossible to penetrate satisfactorily. (51 b&w photos and 6 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-86056-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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